1. Technical Field
The present invention generally relates to computer systems and in particular to use of multiple virtual machines sharing system resources to support multiple client services.
2. Description of the Related Art
Information Technology (IT) service providers are businesses or organizations that provide IT services (e.g., Internet services, application services, backup services, configuration and asset management services, and support desk services) to other businesses or organizations (often referred to as customers or clients). For example, a service provider may prove discovery services, such as inventory scanning, for a customer's IT environment. Such a service involves using an automated means to discover or scan various hardware and software resources installed within the customer's IT environment to generate a complete inventory or asset report.
Currently, both internal and external service providers may provide a discovery service to a customer by setting up an “inventory scanner” for the customer. The “inventory scanner” server is usually a hardware Intel or Unix machine owned and maintained by the service provider. In addition, the service provider also installs a variety of software, such as the scanning engine application, Middleware and databases on the machine. Once the scans are performed using the inventory scanning engine, inventory data gets populated in an inventory database and a report is generated and emailed to the customer.
Current art methods of service provisioning are typically performed by making use of dedicated hardware and software assets that are owned and maintained by the service providers. For example, the inventory scanning server is configured for, and populated with data dedicated to, a particular customer. The same server cannot be used for providing the same or a different service to another customer because (a) the configuration required for the second customer's IT environment may be very different and (b) the data from the second customer's environment would not be isolated from the data from the first customer's environment. Therefore, for example, a service provider is unable to provide inventory scanning for one customer and backup service for another customer from the same physical machine. In the case of a need to provide discovery services for a second customer, a second “inventory scanning server” is required to be set up for the second customer, with a second hardware machine hosting a second set of software. In addition, due to privacy and security reasons, some customers are wary about services being provided to them from the same physical machine that is also being used to provide the same or different services for another customer.